With waste-to-energy plants aplenty, European cities vie for garbage
John Tagliabue, May 7, 2013, :
Oslo is a city that imports garbage. Some comes
from England, some from Ireland. Some is from neighbouring Sweden. It
even has designs on the American market. “I’d like to take some from the
United States,” said Pal Mikkelsen, in his office at a huge plant on
the edge of town that turns garbage into heat and electricity. “Sea
transport is cheap.”Oslo, a recycling-friendly place
where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by
burning garbage – household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and
dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests – has a problem: It has
literally run out of garbage to burn.
The problem is not unique
to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the
practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has
exploded in recent decades, demand for trash far outstrips supply.
“Northern Europe has a huge generating capacity,” said Mikkelsen, 50, a
mechanical engineer who for the last year has been the managing director
of Oslo’s waste-to-energy agency.
Yet the fastidious population
of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year,
he said, far too little to supply incinerating plants that can handle
more than 700 million tons. “And the Swedes continue to build” more
plants, he said, a look of exasperation on his face, “as do Austria and
Germany.”
Stockholm, to the east, has become such a competitor
that it has even managed to persuade some Norwegian municipalities to
deliver their waste there. By ship and by truck, countless tons of
garbage make their way from regions that have an excess to others that
have the capacity to burn it and produce energy. “There’s a European
waste market – it’s a commodity,” said Hege Rooth Olbergsveen, the
senior adviser to Oslo’s waste recovery programme. “It’s a growing
market.”
Most people approve of the idea. “Yes, absolutely,” said
Terje Worren, 36, a software consultant, who admitted to heating his
house with oil and his water with electricity. “It utilises waste in a
good away.”
The English like it too, though they are not big
players in the garbage-for-energy industry. The Yorkshire-based company
that handles garbage collection for cities like Leeds, in the north of
England, now ships as much as 1,000 tons a month of garbage – or, since
the bad stuff has been sorted out, “refuse-derived fuel” – to countries
in Northern Europe, including Norway, according to Donna Cox, a Leeds
city spokeswoman. A British tax on landfill makes it cheaper to send it
to places like Oslo. “It helps us in reducing the escalating costs of
the landfill tax,” Cox wrote in an email. For some, it might seem
bizarre that Oslo would resort to importing garbage to produce energy.
Norway ranks among the world’s 10 largest exporters of oil and gas, and
has abundant coal reserves and a network of more than 1,100
hydroelectric plants in its water-rich mountains. Yet Mikkelsen said
garbage burning was “a game of renewable energy, to reduce the use of
fossil fuels.”
Sensitive questionOf
course, other areas of Europe are producing abundant amounts of garbage,
including southern Italy, where cities like Naples paid towns in
Germany and the Netherlands to accept garbage, helping to defuse a
Neapolitan garbage crisis. Though Oslo considered the Italian garbage,
it preferred to stick with what it said was the cleaner and safer
English waste. “It’s a sensitive question,” Mikkelsen said.
Garbage
may be, well, garbage in some parts of the world, but in Oslo it is
very high-tech. Households separate their garbage, putting food waste in
green plastic bags, plastics in blue bags and glass elsewhere. The bags
are handed out free at groceries and other stores.
The larger of
Mikkelsen’s two waste-to-energy plants uses computerised sensors to
separate the collor-coded garbage bags that race across conveyor belts
and into incinerators. The building’s curved exterior, with lighting
that is visible from a long distance to motorists driving by, competes
architecturally with Oslo’s striking new opera house.
Still, not
everybody is comfortable with this garbage addiction. “From an
environmental point of view, it’s a huge problem,” said Lars
Haltbrekken, the chairman of Norway’s oldest environmental group, an
affiliate of the Friends of the Earth. “There is pressure to produce
more and more waste, as long as there is this overcapacity.”
In a
hierarchy of environmental goals, Haltbrekken said, producing less
garbage should take first place, while generating energy from garbage
should be at the bottom. “The problem is that our lowest priority
conflicts with our highest one,” he said. “So now we import waste from
Leeds and other places, and we also had discussions with Naples,” he
added. “We said,
‘OK, so we’re helping the Neapolitans,’ but that’s not a long-term strategy.”
Maybe
not, city planners say, but for now it is a necessity. “Recycling and
energy recovery have to go hand in hand,” said Rooth Olbergsveen, of the
city’s waste recovery agency. Recycling has made strides, she said, and
the separation of organic garbage, like food waste, has begun enabling
Oslo to produce biogas, which is now powering some buses in downtown
Oslo.
Haltbrekken acknowledged that he does not benefit from
garbage-generated energy. His home near the centre of town, built about
1890, is heated by burning wood pellets, and his water is heated
electrically. In general, he said, Friends of the Earth supports the
city’s environmental goals.
The
state government in Kochi, India has chosen the 'Swiss Challenge
System' of tendering, for its proposed 500 tonne per day Rs. 3.5 billion
($65 million) waste to energy plant in Brahmapuram.